A decision to release two Belarusian prisoners of conscience including
an opposition presidential candidate is a step in the right direction
but the government now needs to free five others who have been in jail
since 2011, Amnesty International said.

On 14 April, opposition
presidential candidate Andrei Sannikau was freed from Vitba-3 prison
colony in Vitebsk following a presidential pardon, which he has told
family members he was pressured into seeking.

Zmitser
Bandarenka, Coordinator of European Belarus and a member of Sannikau’s
campaign team, was released from Mahiliou penal colony #15 the next day.

Four other prisoners of conscience remain behind bars after
being jailed last year for taking part in post-election demonstrations
in December 2010, and a fifth – prominent human rights defender Ales
Bialiatski – has been jailed since November 2011 on trumped-up tax
evasion charges.

“It’s a positive step that Belarusian opposition
candidate Andrei Sannikau and Zmitser Bandarenka are now free, but
prisoners of conscience should never be pressured into signing
confessions or seeking pardons,” said John Dalhuisen, Director of
Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Programme.

“The
Belarusian authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the
remaining prisoners of conscience, who were targeted for human rights
activism and the peaceful exercise of their rights to freedom of
assembly and expression and are being held on unfounded charges.”

Zmitser
Dashkevich, Eduard Lobau, Pavel Sevyarynets and Mykalau Statkevich are
still being held, having been convicted in March and May 2011 and
sentenced to jail terms of between two and six years for their role in
the December 2010 protests.

Andrei Sannikau was sentenced to
five years in prison in May 2011. At a meeting with his wife on 24
January 2012, he told her that on 20 November 2011 he had been forced to
sign a request for clemency addressed to President Lukashenka after
authorities intimated that the Sannikau’s son would be harmed.

On
24 November 2011, the opposition presidential candidate was transferred
to Vitba-3 prison colony in Vitebsk district, after having been
subjected to almost two weeks of constant transfer between detention
centres.

Amnesty International believes that these frequent
transfers were intended to pressure him physically and psychologically
in order to extract a request for clemency.